The United Nations Children’s Fund has ranked the Philippines fifth in the world with “zero-dose children,” as it reckons that there are one million Filipino children who have not received any routine vaccine.
Routine immunization for children includes vaccines for life-threatening diseases such as polio, measles and tuberculosis.
In 2021, the Philippines was the top five contributor to the 18 million zero-dose children globally and the top 7 contributor with the most children unprotected for measles.
This was blamed on past governance challenges, persistent missed opportunities, low demand for services and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The increased number of unimmunized children puts them at risk of severe diseases that can be entirely prevented with safe, effective and free-of-cost vaccines.
“Falling child immunization rates and the increasing number of children at risk of measles, polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases must be treated as a public health emergency that needs urgent action,” said UNICEF Philippines representative Oyunsaikhan Dendevnorov.
“Lessons learned from COVID-19 highlight the need to strengthen primary health care through integrated health and nutrition services for a strong, resilient health system in the long term,” he added.
UNICEF said the Philippines has already been plagued with low coverage of protective vaccines even before the pandemic, never having met the ideal target of 95 percent routine coverage rate for children since the 1990s.
Based on the 2022 World Health Organization Risk Assessment, all regions in the Philippines are now at high risk for a measles outbreak. The country also had to deal with a polio outbreak, despite the disease having been declared as eradicated by vaccination in most parts of the world.
The massive effort undertaken by the Philippine government to attempt to vaccinate its people from COVID-19 proves that given the will and the resources, mass vaccination is possible in this country. Expanding that vaccination effort to include the country’s zero-dose children should be doable if it is given the proper attention by the government.
Let’s not waste any more time and endanger more lives.*
